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Jim When court adjourns down here and we Must go Beyond to try The cause up there, he'll not agree, This is the reason why: He's always had his way down here, And he will stand erect, Declare that he will not appear, "Your Honor, I object!" Kansas Cily, Mo.
The
Popular
Dissatisfaction
with
the
Administration
of Justice in the United States By Charles W. Eliot, LL.D. President Emeritus of Harvard University [In view of its obvious importance, we prefer to exclude other matter from our pages this month to make room for Dr. Eliot's timely and valuable paper read before the Massachusetts Bar Association. Readers will find in these views new confirmation of the trite characterization that this distinguished layman never touched any subject which he did not illumine: nihil quod tetigit non ornavit. Few lawyers have written with so broad a comprehension of actual conditions or with a clearer notion of the practical remedies available. The paper is printed in the form in which it appeared in the Springfield Republican.— Ed.] IWfR. PRESIDENT and Members of ■* I feeltheit Massachusetts absolutely necessary Bar: — to ex plain my appearance before you with a paper on the causes of the popular dis satisfaction with the administration of justice in this country. When your committee invited me to read a paper on that subject before this association of lawyers, I said at once that I was wholly incompetent to do so, that it was a subject with which only a judge or a practising lawyer could adequately deal, and that a layman could have no standing before a professional body like this. Your committee urged that the precise thing wanted was a paper by an observant layman who was accustomed to studying the trend and force of pub lic opinion, that no judge or practitioner was in position to understand and describe from the people's point of view the causes of the popular discontent,
that professional learning and experi ence were a bar in the minds of the public not only to making an influential statement of the causes of the evil, but also to making a convincing proposal of remedies. Your committee further urged that they had consulted both judges and practitioners on the question of employ ing a layman, and had been advised to do so. Under these circumstances I re luctantly accepted the invitation — and have been sorry ever since that I did so, although I appreciate highly the honor of so peculiar a choice. I was brought up as a student of science, and was therefore trained in the careful study of ascertained facts as the only legitimate basis for some strictly limited inference. This paper, on the contrary, is based on general impres sions received through inaccurate re ports of trials, both civil and criminal, of legislative proceedings, and of police
